I’m in the process of degoogling and I’m stuck trying to find a reasonable alternative to Chromecast. It would be great if I could stream music/video from my phone to my TV from apps like RiMusic, Tidal, and NewPipe. Are there any good solutions? Even better if friends and family can use it with minimal additional setup.
Chromecast is fraud. Use DLNA
We’d love to but there are almost zero Android apps that suport DLNA. You can use DLNA for your Jellyfin but if you want to cast from the app of any large streaming service it wants Chromecast (or Apple TV, which is another quagmire).
Does Kore make the Netflix app stream to Kodi?
Even if it does, I can’t exactly make everybody who comes by install an app to be able to stream to my TV. Everybody (who’s on Wifi) can stream to the Chromecast.
How so? It seems like chromecast does exactly what it says it does, even if it’s a suboptimal solution for not being FOSS.
What is does is stupid. You always want to stream the media, not mirror your screen!
I wonder if you’ve ever used a Chromecast based on this criticism.
For a standard Chromecast, you open the app on your phone, then press the cast button, then the device you want to cast to, and the the device begins to stream the media independently of your device. You can shut off the device you used to start casting and it doesn’t matter because Chromecast is pulling the data on its own.
On some websites such as YouTube on PC, you also have a cast button and you can press it, select the device and it’ll start playing. you can get this button to work on all kinds of sites, and a lot of open source software supports it to a degree such as VLC, Peertube (through a plugin), and Jellyfin.
Using google chrome you can cast your current webpage or your desktop, but that’s not the standard use of Chromecast.
It takes some finagling, but you can cast from Jellyfin to a standard Chromecast right from your phone.
The latest version out is Chromecast with Android TV, which is really nice (for now). It’s running a version of android and has the play store, so you can set up the Jellyfin android TV app, and stream from your home server without requiring a domain name or https like you do to stream properly on straight Chromecast.
The big issue with Chromecast in my view is that it’s a Google product which means 3 things:
- it’s proprietary, which has many risks coming from that nature and a crappy largely hidden API
- it can be shut down any moment if they desire (see google graveyard), and being an always-on device it’s possible they just brick it on the way out
- it will suck up as much data as they can from you to try to sell you more crap
There’s a litany of them, but the issue is more about what apps will connect to them reliably. The support on apps is really what you’re looking for, as a single app can support multiple streaming targets.
Since you’re talking about some pretty widely adopted apps, maybe look at an Airplay alternative as well, since there’s also a ton of those, and a lot of them are actively developed.
Well, I don’t understand your technical wants or needs, but you can Google or hit GitHub and find dozens pretty easily. Look into what Home Assistant is using these days as an easy starter list maybe. Also worth using Raspberry Pi as an included search term to find projects specifically geared for turning an RPi into a Chromecast or Airplay target.
Jellyfin and self host!
There are probably better alternatives, but I have a raspbery pi plugged into my tv and use KDE connect to remote control the mouse and keyboard from my phone. If I wanna watch youtube I’ll navigate to youtube.com and click on a video.
Plasma actually has a UI for smart TVs if you weren’t aware, although I have never used it myself so I’m not sure how good it is. https://plasma-bigscreen.org
I’ve heard that the focus is on the ARM versions (so maybe they are much more developed) but I tried the x86_64 version on my HTPC recently and it was super barebones.
In the end I found Gnome with a few extensions to be a better solution for my needs
Any suggestions about Gnome extensions?
I use Gnome on a 42" tv the only thing I’ve done is increasing zoom level since the couch is a bit far from the screen. In the browser I set up the new tab screen to have big icons that link to some of my bookmarks, using a browser extension. That’s all I’ve done compared to a vanilla setup. I have been using that for a few years with no issues but curious about how I could improve my experience!
Amazon is working on adding casting capabilities to the Matter framework, but at the moment it’s only implemented in the Echo Show and on Prime video.